January 28, 2008

It is not news to observe that child issues cause women scientists some considerable career anxiety. When to tell the lab or the PI that you are pregnant? Should you wait to start “trying” until after the job interviews? Until after tenure so as to be taken as a “serious” scientist? How many children are “allowable”? How many pictures of the little darlin’s can go over the bench? Should the “balance” of lab and child rearing be kept as opaque as possible from one’s lab?
In contrast men have a much greater ability to conceal their “dad”-ness from their labs. They should not do so.
The father/PI who is seriously concerned about gender equity in science will go out of his way to exhibit his status. If you agree, there is no need to read below the fold.

January 28, 2008

I missed this story at National Public Radio initially but luckily multiple sources have been all over it, see below. The nutshell from the NPR piece on a Cambridge, MA heroin-addict treatment center is as follows:

Elissa has been on methadone for six years, but she confesses that she used heroin a couple of days in the previous month because she was under a lot of stress.
Like most long-term heroin users, Elissa has had scary experiences with overdoses – her own and others’. Once, her partner became unresponsive after taking a mixture of heroin, benzodiazepine pills and alcohol, she says.

“Where to start, where to start?”, muses Your Humble Narrator. Where indeed. From the start we have the concepts of agonist therapy for drug abuse, the generally poor performance of interventions for drug abuse at present, relapse, overdose in users, whether in treatment or not, and drug combinations resulting in medical emergency. Are you getting the impression this stuff is complicated? Good. Because people in the Office of National Drug Control Policy (aka “Drug Czar”) seem to think this is duck soup. Even when they should know better.

January 28, 2008

I missed this story at National Public Radio initially but luckily multiple sources have been all over it, see below. The nutshell from the NPR piece on a Cambridge, MA heroin-addict treatment center is as follows:

Elissa has been on methadone for six years, but she confesses that she used heroin a couple of days in the previous month because she was under a lot of stress.
Like most long-term heroin users, Elissa has had scary experiences with overdoses – her own and others’. Once, her partner became unresponsive after taking a mixture of heroin, benzodiazepine pills and alcohol, she says.

“Where to start, where to start?”, muses Your Humble Narrator. Where indeed. From the start we have the concepts of agonist therapy for drug abuse, the generally poor performance of interventions for drug abuse at present, relapse, overdose in users, whether in treatment or not, and drug combinations resulting in medical emergency. Are you getting the impression this stuff is complicated? Good. Because people in the Office of National Drug Control Policy (aka “Drug Czar”) seem to think this is duck soup. Even when they should know better.